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Unpiloted Passenger Jet Tests
spacepingu writes "The UK military recently tested a remote-controlled passenger jet over south-west England. Although the pilot was sitting in the back of the aging BAC 1-11, he controlled it entirely using the 'UAV Command and Control Interface (UAVCCI)'. This also allowed him to operate several virtual UAVs in a simulated attack scenario. The ultimate goal is for a fighter pilot to control a swarm of attack UAVs alongside his own plane. Next March, a Tornado fighter pilot will use the UAVCCI to fly the unpiloted BAC1-11 as well as several simulated UAVs, all from the cockpit of his own jet."
Ender's game = prior art ? :)
I wonder if any of these pilots can rub their stomach and pat their head at the same time too.
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So, in the future, someone can hack your passenger flight and take control of it remotely? Hope they stock clean underwear along with the barf bags on these flights.
Not that I see this coming to commercial flights any time soon (if ever), but: having the pilot not actually on the plane would make airplane hijacking a hell of a lot harder. If the pilot can't be personally threatened, and isn't directly faced with passengers being threatened*, it would be easier for "don't go along" training to be effective.
*Does anyone have a link to that study where people were asked to press a button to "electrocute" other people, and how many were willing to do it as long as they were told by an authority figure it was ok? Were there also results regarding whether or not the subject could see the person being "electrocuted?"
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
I want those risks to be as low as possible. We should put these drone navigation/steering controls into planes with pilots. Let the pilots steer for 15 minutes an hour, to keep them engaged. Let them analyze the air traffic data, with visual confirmations, for their airspace, shared with each other and on the ground. Keep all the telemetry streamed to the global network in realtime, instead of trapped in mysterious black boxes on the endangered planes. Put their bodies on the line, and their minds to work on keeping everyone safe.
We can use these automations and networks to completely revolutionize air safety. From accidents, collisions, hijackings, onboard sickness and other other incidents. Don't just put pilots out of work: make the investments in the crew return many times more, with more effective use of their skills and motivations.
"The Bravery of Being Out of Range" by Roger Waters
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make install -not war
... ... might as well say it while it is still legal.
Of course they put guns on them. Adding explosive chemicals is a sure way to get funding!
Personally, I think this is one of the more disturbing elements of the 21st century. The only thing that stops us western powers invading the next oil-rich country is the fact that body-bags equals votes for your opposition. If you can fight a war where no people* die, then fighting war just became politically cheaper.
*People as in the "there are only 3000 deaths in Iraq" form of the word. You know, the racist "our enemies are sub-human" and we aren't counting bodies meme.
Unpiloted passenger aircraft are certainly a bad idea, but I could see a place for it. Think about cargo aircraft, particularly ones on trans-oceanic routes. You could build whole fleets of very inexpensive cargo carriers, because you wouldn't have to have a flight deck or windows, or run all of the control lines up to the front of the plane (all those miles of wiring); the computer "flying" the plane doesn't even all have to be in one spot, it could be in semi-independent pieces throughout the airframe. That means the only limitations to the design are technical and aerodynamic.
Such a plane could fly low and slow to save fuel, because it wouldn't have to worry about pilots or passengers getting tired. And if the plane started to deviate course and fly towards a populated area, you'd shoot it down or self-destruct it up while it's still somewhere safe, just like a Range Safety Officer does for satellite/rocket launches.
The lower cost of these flights could bring air cargo to parts of the world where it's currently not economically feasible (basically anyplace outside the First World or its major manufacturing centers), or bring goods that currently aren't economical to ship by air. Anything that lowers the cost of transportation can have wide-ranging effects.
I think there's a definite market for self-piloted aircraft for cargo duty, on long-haul flights over unpopulated areas.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
People are going to be understandably resistant to unmanned passenger flights. That being said, if this type of technology is cheap enough and has an acceptable degree of proven safety, companies like UPS and FedEx will not wait long to convert all their cargo flight. Pilots are an expensive resource, and with the unions, I doubt passenger airlines will wait long to jump on the bandwagon.
"Si vis pacem para bellum" -Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus
I recall a Nova PBS program about a pilotless plane. It shows a jetliner plowing into a forest but then a computer was flying it...
Honestly though. a jet pilot, in the fur-ball of combat, not only flying HIS craft but controlling pilotless drones alongside? That is crazy!. Combat already uses 110% of the pilot's concentration, adding an aditional plane(s) to his work load will tip him to overload. The enmey need not worry; the pilot will probably run into his own..
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
Something's loose with those conspiracy lunatics, but you'd better check the screws and not the change.
Where were you when the voynix came?
True, but only to some extent, and only in some warped way of splitting hairs.
1. Either when you're getting an extremely short pulse from a spark, or when you're connected to thick wires and with your arms on metal plates (as in at least one version of the experiment), then U = I * R, or I = U / R. There's a direct and linear proportionality between the two, so "it's current that kills" vs "it's voltage that kills" is just splitting hairs.
2. In practice, neither kills you as such. In practice you need both current (or voltage, since they're proportional) and enough _time_. Either to stop the heart or to literally cook you. Neither happens instantly. So in another way you could say it's not current either, but _charge_ that kills you. (As in Q = I * T.)
But in practice even that's not as simple a relationship, because even a hideous charge if it's something like micro-amperes over 10 years, also doesn't kill you. It must reach enough voltage over the heart muscles (or current times their resistance, if you want to stick to current) to cause them to spasm, and last long enough for that heart to not just skip a beat and recover.
3. If you want to go into even deeper details, the pulse length and wave form can cause even more anomalous behaviour, as observed in people struck by lightning. Unlike people killed by touching a high voltage wire, where you can see the trail of destroyed tissue between the two points, lightning seems to cause a _flashover_ effect, where it just flashes over the surface of the body without causing much damage inside. There are thermal burns on the entry and exit points, and clothes are often burned, but the tissue in between is pretty much intact. It just doesn't show the kind of destruction that that hideously large charge would cause if it actually went through flesh. (By comparison, a smaller charge in electric chair executions causes the eyes to boil and melt, and tissue to be cooked.)
4. But that all is still somewhat irrelevant when talking about Joe Sixpack's instinctive reaction to "you can give this other guy a 450V zap". Joe Sixpack knows that his 110V socket at home can kill or cause serious tissue damage, and it doesn't take a genius to figure out that 450V is four times that. Heck, I figure I know more physics, and I'm not sure I'd go much farther than that either. You don't need paper and pencil and diagrams of the exact pulse shape and duration to figure out "omg, I could _kill_ that other guy", especially when the highest voltage rating says "Danger: Extreme Shock." You know, a "Danger" sign is kinda hammered into our mind to mean just that. Doubly so when the other guy told you that he has heart problems. Even if you did the maths and stuff, the possibility of a heart arrest has hit you like a brick-inna-sock already, and you're not gonna shake it off that easily.
And that's in the end all I'm saying. That when you put an average person in a situation as unbelievable as "you can give this other guy a potentially lethal shock... oh, heh, except he's in another room and you can't actually see it", the instinctive reaction would be "you're shitting me".
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.